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This week on Lorna’s Ginspiring Writing Prompts (or, #GinPrompts for short), Lorna asked a simple question: How far have you travelled from home? I’m not what you’d call a natural traveller. Wanderlust doesn’t seem to be in my blood — while I occasionally want to be somewhere else, I’d usually prefer to already be there, without the fuss of actually getting there, and no matter how much I enjoy being away from home, I also find myself constantly anticipating getting…

It’s a cliche to say it, but being a new adult is hard. For the last eighteen years, my life has been divided up into education and not-education. Everything was always temporary: I was at school, or I was at home, and sooner or later that would reverse and I’d be at home, or I’d be at school. When I was at uni, the year was divided into term time and non-term time, and I knew that wherever I was…

I’m entering Pitch Wars at the end of this month (next week, yikes), so of course I’m working on my synopsis. Trying to nail that balance of summary and style. How do I convey the emotions of the book while keeping it to one page in length? Which characters are REALLY the most important ones here? Is Comma, when used as the name of a guild of assassins, singular or plural?* *This particular grammar question is, for the record, killing…

Working three days a week means that technically speaking, I have more days off work than days at work. Despite this, I still feel an enormous sense of pressure to get things done on those days off — to hit writing targets, take photos for instagram, write blog posts, run errands, do dance practice… All the things I don’t have the time or energy to do on work days. This is not inherently a problem. I’m pretty sure this kind…

I’m currently line-editing Butterfly of Night, a novel about a screwed-up teenage assassin and her poor life choices. In June and July, I did a major plot rewrite with some big changes, and this month I’m rewriting the whole thing again for style, continuity, and because it’s too long and I need to cut as many words as possible. (I’ve cut 2411 words so far. I’m aiming for 5k overall, but I’m not sure how I’m going to get there.)…

I don’t know whether you guys are familiar with the concept of studyspo, but I come across it quite a lot, on both Tumblr and Instagram. Both platforms have their own studyspo communities (studyblr and #studygram respectively) of people who post aesthetic pictures of their notes and schoolwork to inspire and motivate others to study — as well as to celebrate their own progress, of course. There are some particular hallmarks of the kind of things people tend to post,…

Wow, sorry for abruptly disappearing from the blog for nearly three weeks. I was doing a lot better on the ‘regularly posting’ thing, and then… well, life happened. Firstly, I got the flu, which was miserable. Also, my immune system is completely useless, so it lasted way too long — I spent several days unable to get out of bed, but still had a horrible chesty cough a week and a half later. The fatigue it caused was also pretty…

I thought, since my last post was a bit of a downer, I’d write one concentrating on some of the bright points of this week. Because there were bright points! To be honest, I felt awful on Wednesday, but it’s been a slow and steady improvement since then. I’m still stressed and anxious and overworked, but I haven’t had any more panic attacks. So, here are some pieces of good news. 1. My friend Cait’s book is coming out in…

I started writing another post in my ‘going to university’ series on Monday, this time about what to wear to lectures and so on, because that was something I worried a lot about just before I started. I wrote most of the post on my phone, so I had to leave it unfinished because I wanted to embed some tweets and have yet to figure out how to do that via the app, and figured I’d post it promptly. And…

While I have the energy to be upright and write this post (which I’ve saved up by spending all day in bed, not intentionally), I figured I’d give you a few important updates. First, I shifted my blog to its new host at the weekend, which means it might break. Both my hosts (old and new) seem convinced they’re hosting the site, and I guess we won’t know for sure which one’s supporting it until the old hosting runs out,…